Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 235. (Read 2032248 times)

Spot on.

BTC needs to go through it's growth phases to get to it's ultimate destination. 1mb blocks doesn't allow for this to happen.

Their plan kills the network effect which leads to bitcoin integration. It's a direct threat to bitcoin maintaining and winning as "The Worldwide Ledger". Their activities are the greatest threat to bitcoin. A possible drop in nodes or their "centralization" threat is nowhere near as severe as them kneecapping bitcoin in it's race to global use and integration.

It was a no-brainer that bitcoin was going to come out on top and be "the blockchain". I'm not so sure anymore.

Just FWIW, if the current Blockstream cohort does this there is some chance that I would convert over via proof-of-burn on reasonable terms, and especially if the clowns cannot be run out of Bitcoin (which doesn't seem eminent.)  I'd want to see it backing sidechains and would want to see a modestly promising sidechains ecosystem in practice first.


Pfft!  How's that working out for you after half a decade now?  Not well?  How very surprising that a solution which is vastly inferior to the competition in the exchange currency space cannot get a foothold.  Even with an amazing degree of media support, and even a surprising degree regulatory support here in the U.S. for that matter.

Edit:  BTW, what the fuck do you know about SV anyway?  'Outrunning regulation' was no more a winning strategy than 'security through obscurity'.  Sure, it can work fine...mostly when nobody gives a shit about you.

It really is that bad:

There are claims of an astonishing three-year fall in a Greek person’s life expectancy in just five years since the country’s economy crashed. If confirmed, this would be without precedent in modern Europe.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-3123060/Babies-held-hostage-medical-fees-porters-paramedics-19-20-cut-searing-despatch-Athens-s-blood-soaked-hospitals-shows-Greece-literally-dying-leave-Euro.html

so the other day they lie to us that a deal had been struck just so they can ramp the stock mkt and yet we hear this only 2h ago:

Default dangerously closer after Greece debt talks collapse

Brussels (AFP) - Default by debt-wracked Greece loomed dangerously closer after last-ditch talks between Athens and its EU-IMF creditors collapsed on Sunday, bringing the threat of a Greek exit from the euro closer than ever.

http://news.yahoo.com/greece-bailout-talks-end-no-deal-significant-gaps-171655815.html

Greg,

it's just not the for profits that want to embed data into the mainchain that will be outraged, it will be all of the for profits in the space.  which is ALL of them. eventually.  why?  b/c they all depend on growth which means increasing users which can only happen by increasing the limit.  there may be a few of them that you can temporarily convince with your obfuscations.

the reason SC's won't work is b/c none of them are going to want to hitch their futures to Blockstream that has shown they will do what's best for themselves and not Bitcoin.

Hear, hear.

it's been so long since i've even thought of spinoffs.  PeterR should be able to attest to that.  it shouldn't even be needed the way Bitcoin has progressed.  

i see Bitcoin as being highly successful and fulfilling it's vision.  you seem to see shadows everywhere.

i see XT as merely an upgrade to that vision needed for growth which will make mining sustainable in the long run by keeping tx fees on the mainchain.  

also, about your hangup about every single user being capable of running a full node, Satoshi saw otherwise:

Long before the network gets anywhere near as large as that, it would be safe
for users to use Simplified Payment Verification (section eight) to check for
double spending, which only requires having the chain of block headers, or
about 12KB per day.  Only people trying to create new coins would need to run
network nodes.  At first, most users would run network nodes, but as the
network grows beyond a certain point, it would be left more and more to
specialists with server farms of specialized hardware.  A server farm would
only need to have one node on the network and the rest of the LAN connects with
that one node.

https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography%40metzdowd.com/msg09964.html

i've always said that when it comes down to federated server pegged SC's, go right ahead.  it doesn't change the protocol so i don't worry.  it's not a valid proxy for spvp anyways so i'm not sure why you'd claim it would be.  yeah, i have a problem with spvp b/c it's a protocol change to facilitate your business model and i'd think most of the for-profit companies that have constructed themselves around op_return embedded data would be outraged at facing higher tx fees.  perhaps that's why Luke has been accusing them of spam these days?

for the thousandth time, 1MB was a temporary patch to counteract DoS on the network when it was small and vulnerable.  today is quite different, which goes to your pt that things have evolved for Bitcoin to easily remove that artificial limit to allow for the inevitable growth that will come in the next spike.  cramping it at 1MB, which was never meant to happen, is the height of hypocrisy. many, many ppl including in the technical community that i see here and on reddit feel that the limit should be raised.  everyone who works in SV understands that rapidly gaining mkt share via the Uber and AirBnB model  works and is crucial to outrunning regulation.  your small block theory is the epitome of centralization forcing all users off the mainchain and into offchain solutions, some more centralized and regulated than others.

As a point of order; since this seems to be a common and oft-exploited set of misconceptions.

Or the proposals to add censorship to tor that _seriously_ pissed off the tor developers? Or the coin confiscation proposal? Or the near constant, first short recourse to centralized, authoritarian solutions-- at a level of consistency that it would be a comedy if it weren't so sad?


You have some comparison a bit backwards there, there are other people lobbing for a sudden rule change to the system-- against substantial controversy and out from under the preferences of a substantial minority (e.g. your poll shows a quarter in opposition) whos interest you might want to explore.

Two of the Five people with commit access to Bitcoin core (or a half dozen out of a hundred contributors) created Blockstream to build some important tech that we the space need (and had been lamenting it's non-existence for a long time before we went and found a way to fund doing it!). As the primary technical innovators in this space (certainly if you exclude altcoin work) we can be assured good consulting incomes so long as we keep doing good, important, quality work-- regardless of what happens with SC or LN... and we have a _long_ backlog of powerful technology that we couldn't release for use in Bitcoin without it just ending up in an altcoin before the prospect of sidechains.  But no matter what you protest, you cannot stop LN or SC from existing in some form or another; and they offer advantages Bitcoin by itself fundamentally cannot: e.g. LN can give _instantly_ irreversible payments-- think of all the applications that hold of on using Bitcoin for lack of that; but it's not possible in the plain Bitcoin system.  Look at CT-- we can't just go and try that in Bitcoin and figure out how to advance it, prior to SC there was no avenue to adapt to new needs without picking switching from Bitcoin to a competing currency. None of these things have anything to do with block size, and-- in fact, both SC and LN _strongly_ prefer the biggest blocksize the network can handle.  What they can't tolerate, however, is Bitcoin being very centralized-- and I don't think your own interests can tolerate that either (assuming you still own some Bitcoin).

I bring up spinoffs beyond it just being an honest question because it was your argument on these points-- why worry about what happens to bitcoin when we can create some altcoin that enriches the existing bitcoin holders.  I don't know how much this perspective influences your position here, arguably a spinnoff perspective would strongly prefer original bitcoin would fail, it it would just transfer ownership into a new network before people notice and buy up their coins on the cheap as the developers of counterparty did. ::shrugs:: It's easy to throw rocks about conflicts of interest. But the reality is that the arguments I've presented are straightforward, coherent, extend long before any plausibly argued conflict of interest, and are shared to some degree or another by almost everyone in the technical space, including ones which no amount of fevered imagination can construct a coherent conflict of interest story.

(And at least in my case you know who I am, what business I'm in, what my history is, heck I've even shared details of my employment contract with you---- this is not the same for most other people. But even with that opacity, it's easy to find "shadows" of conflict of interest, if someone wants take your approach of claiming any that can be claimed whenever it supports an argument)

Though back to your question, if you've given up on spinoffs as a salvation-- what do you think is going to make Bitcoin competative against the eventual altcoin that actually gets the formula right and makes significant, no compromise, technical advantages over Bitcoin--- and probably doesn't bother to cut you in on it?  Keep in mind, most of the people we hope will some day use Bitcoin haven't even been born yet.  Unless we fail and sully the potential for cryptocurrency in the public's mind, this is only the very beginning of a long history.

hey Greg, do you even understand the concept of "financial conflict"?  if 6 of the Fed Bd of Governors were to set up a for profit company that directly benefitted from the institution of a particular new rule applied to US monetary policy, what would you say to that?

btw, Spinoffs is not my project; it's PeterR's.  i haven't commented in that thread for probably a year or so.

marcus and his character assassins like to argue that Bitcoin should be a "settlement currency". 

how can it ever be a settlement currency when it's use is currently confined to a small group of users?  let alone when the Blockstream plan is to shunt the vast majority of tx's to SC's or LN preventing our transition to mining paid for by tx fees?

it's a ludicrous economic plan that will cause Bitcoin itself to wither and die.  but when your business model depends on SC consulting fees it will be quite lucrative; in USD.

Your selective quoting ignores how this was a response to a 'how could this possibly work at all'.  I've used the same kind of response to "omg flooding network! how could that possibly work! it's completely non-scalable!" -- to point out that even non-scalable can achieve some remarkable stuff.  This doesn't answer any particular question about the exact tradeoff that works, but works to wake people up.  Particular because before Bitcoin the alternative was exclusively centralized systems so when you show that if you don't care about decentralization (which you must not if you question the value it provides compared to all that came before) then it can reach arbitrarily high scale.

We can't hope to guess at what anyone from back then would think about the current state of the world, though we do know that e.g. the current mining ecosystem would have been regarded as a system failure from the original precepts; and we also know that decentralization and autonomy were principle motivations for the creation of the system in the first place.

While I'm here, hows your Bitcoin Spinoffs project going, Cypherdoc?

lots and lots of big words.  never any justification for preventing Bitcoin from fulfilling it's original vision:

Satoshi Nakamoto wrote:
> The bandwidth might not be as prohibitive as you
> think.  A typical transaction would be about 400 bytes
> (ECC is nicely compact).  Each transaction has to be
> broadcast twice, so lets say 1KB per transaction.
> Visa processed 37 billion transactions in FY2008, or
> an average of 100 million transactions per day.  That
> many transactions would take 100GB of bandwidth, or
> the size of 12 DVD or 2 HD quality movies, or about
> $18 worth of bandwidth at current prices.


https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography%40metzdowd.com/msg10006.html

Unfortunately that is the standard you have set in your own thread, and on reddit also it seems. I'm just obliging after you choose to play the man and not the ball, on enough occasions now to show that it is not just a fluke, but you are intent on poisoning the debate and swerving away from legitimate technical discussion. Endlessly parroting character smears doesn't make them real.

I kind of regret that I may have armed you with so many big words and concepts that you might actually sound convincingly smart enough to be dangerous, to the unwary reader.

do you ever have any real arguments to bring to the debate?  or is it always just slander and defamation with you?

do unto others as you would have them do unto you ...

I'm glad someone else is paying attention. The productivity of the current crop of core devs has outpaced the surveillance branch and Gavin's threat to fork is a desperate attempt to regain control, which is fast slipping away from them, just through sheer innovation. They are losing in the meritocracy stakes.

Gavin's last major contribution was back-dooring bitcoin privacy through the broken X.409 bolt-on kludge, 'payments security' (theatre). He is not a leader in content, quality or name any longer as far as I am concerned. And he still needs to come clean about how much and when he knew about the Bitcoin Foundation collapse, after drawing a salary from them for so long and being the sole reason it was instituted. He seems to be in a hurry to distance himself from that particular fiasco.

If you're not catching flak, you're not over the target.

at least i have the self control not to become as venomous as you.

is this a crusade for you?  you honor me for putting me up on such a pedestal.